My mother has avoided consistent therapy throughout her life. In my twenties, after gently interrogating why, it pained me to hear her describe how it felt to be dulled, to feel less on antidepressants, anti-hysterics, or the medication she was occasionally prescribed. As a person who feels everything, I sympathized. I understood how shocking that reality might be, to be stripped of your compass, to lose your sense of being when you are forced to neutralize a part of yourself. Even if half of that self is shadowed by psychosis, at least itās your own. The sad thing is, there was a tricky and moral conundrum we found ourselves in as a family. By honoring her wishes, we disarmed ourselves to her perpetual violence. Abuse, in so many ways, exists in the governance of the mind.
Even still, I canāt help but compare my life to my motherās and acknowledge the immense privileges Iāve had that she didnāt. Itās the weird paradox of accepting complex and nuanced situations. On soft days, when I am feeling tenderness toward myself, I am able to accept everything that has happened to me in my life. I can see myself with clarity and precision. I can hold all the things Iāve gained and lost and honor them separately. I know Iāve had access to many life choices she was never afforded, things that, even if she began to be aware of as she aged, she never fully trusted. For me, with a sister who was committed to ādoing the (inner) workā before I knew what that was, I was thrust into spaces of thinking about the mind, of thinking about trauma more holistically. Even before I was an adult who could choose to be cynical, I believed in the miraculous power of healing.
Throughout this book, Iāll keep coming back to the concept of policing the imagination. Saidiya Hartman writes about this in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, stating, āSo much of the work of oppression is about policing the imagination.ā1 One of the hardest parts of healing from childhood trauma, especially parental abuse (or any kind of abuse that requires grooming and consistency) is unlearning the impact of something that gravely affected your expectations and experience of life. This is why mental capacity, strain, and processing are all important aspects of wellness. Sometimes, despite wanting to heal, people are blocked from healing because it is largely inaccessible to them. If my mother refuses to participate in society as a person who takes accountability for her limitations (and therefore refuses to take the steps that will afford her own safety and the protection of others), how do we factor it into the discourse of wellness that suggests the playing field is the same for anyone in the pursuit of a better life?
There are so many ways that white supremacy polices your imagination, and other systems of oppression use similar tactics to keep you small. Abuse is just another disadvantage, though itās rarely taken into context in terms of how its limitations might define you, and therefore immobilize you in the process of healing. In When the Body Says No, Gabor MatĆ© writes, āExcessive emotional involvement with a parent, a lack of psychological independence, an overwhelming need for love and affection, and the inability to feel or express anger have long been identified by medical observers as possible factors in the natural development of disease.ā2 Emotions, he explains later, directly modulate the immune system. As someone who has been sick for much of my life, and finding myself in multiple abusive relationships throughout the years, MatĆ©ās work helped me realize the mind and body are inextricably linked, and trauma creates a pattern of a coping adaptive response in both the mind and body.
Working with my trauma therapist to ālocate my rageā has been something I find extremely hard to do. Sometimes it takes years, but when I finally synthesize my anger, like everything in my life, I turn bad feelings into gold, I alchemize shit into magic. While I celebrate this quality in me, my ability to alchemize shit into magicābelieving itās whatās enabled me to achieve anythingāIāve also begun to understand that forgiveness is not always the answer. Sometimes itās necessary to feel anger, to validate the fire within. Itās always been easy for me to fight for justice, for liberation, because once again I sublimated these feelings into something I deemed meaningful. What I didnāt realize was that there was still a lot of unprocessed anger that I was in turn directing back toward myself. It wasnāt until therapy that I realized being forever pleasant and flexible to other peopleās needs wasnāt a skill. Through accepting that, I was able to gain a holistic perspective of who I am, one that is not marred by judgment or haunted by the ghosts of my parents, but rather an acknowledgment by a person truly honest with herself in every capacity, good or bad. My own inner voice was so demanding, so mean-spirited, I had developed an acceptance and blur of it, believing that it made me stronger, and thus better.
Most of my life, if people hated me or did something painful to me, I always felt like I deserved it. Iāve assumed most people were, or are, better than me. Iāve assumed they were more moral than I was because I believed I was lacking in some fundamental way and therefore deserved to be punished and taught a lesson. This has kept me in a loop of always needing to prove that Iām the good guy. Happy to learn, to concede, happy to do more. I never considered that this may be something that I was told to ensure I remain small. I never once assumed that my mother was actually recycling ideas that she had of herself, that she then needed to reiterate and project onto me so she wouldnāt be alone in that experience of her presumed failings. I was the little doll she placed secrets, fears, questions, ugliness, darkness, and depravity into. I carried them for her, I wore those feelings because she cracked me open and sunk herself into my spine, crawling into me like a puppeteerās hand.
Recently Iāve begun to question: Where does she end and where do I begin? Who am I when I donāt have her in my head, when she isnāt speaking for me, or to me? In order to keep me trapped, cloistered by her side, she had to make me believe that I could never leave. I left physically over a decade ago. But Iām still here, and so is she. Thing is, Iām trying to let her go completely so that I can embody who I am. That means looking at myself and examining what made me this way and the impact itās had on my health, both mental and physical; keeping a record, keeping track, to ensure my own safety.
For more than half my life Iāve suffered from some ailment: asthma, eczema, chronic body pain, dysmorphia, dysphoria, acute unknown sadness, IBS, general gut issues, constant flu/weak immune system, then early stages of vaginismus. I have never felt truly well. My gravitation toward wellness was because I didnāt have a choice. I knew if I didnāt confront what was underneath all the unraveling signs of my mind and body, I would live in this half life. Or else I really would kill myself. Either way, I had no choice, something had to give.
* * *
I was bred to take a hit. My motherās rage could erupt at any moment, so I fashioned myself against her, cowering to be absolved. For vast years of my life, whenever the hits came, I let her use my body with disposability. In Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, David Wojnarowicz writes about his fatherās abuse so rapturously: āYou almost welcome the beatings because itās a show of some kind of affectionāyouāll take anything when you canāt get nothin.ā3 Not knowing when and what could provoke her violence, I considered my unworthiness the only possible explanation. Even if death was constantly on the horizon, the looming threat of being harmed was a sort of sick safety I attached myself to. The consistency was safe, because at least she was engaging with me, at least in those moments she knew I was alive.
At a young age I realized it was uncouth to talk about my ugly home life, so I hid it. In my teens, a few incidents made me shut out (and up) even more. The first was when I was about fourteen and I gathered a group of girls at my school because I was suicidal. In the space between one class and another, I sat on a concrete hill and shared details of my torrid familial existence. When the bell rang for class, everyone got up like I had done a presentation and walked away. No one talked to me about it again. The second time I went to the school counselor, roughly around the same age, and told them about the knife incident. I needed someone to offer me help so I could take it. My father was called into the school, and when I had to recall what I had told my counselor, I bit my lip against his visible discomfort and undermined myself. As I walked to...
